Windows 7 Backup & Clickfree External Hard Drive issues

Hi All

Just in case this information is of any use to someone, I thought it might save the endless hours of wall-bashing I've just finished. :rolleyes:

I purchased a Clickfree C2 1TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive. I purchased this instead of a Western Digital drive because the floods in Thailand have meant that prices for WD, Seagate and Samsung hard drives - whether internal or external - have almost trebled in New Zealand over the last week: :eek: the pain of being a small market with very small amounts of stock! The unit was destined for use on a custom-built AMD X2 3.4GHz system with a Samsung 1TB internal HDD running W7 HP 64-bit.

So there are 2 things I want to highlight / warn about:
1) The annoying CDFS partition on the Clickfree C2 drives can only be removed by physically opening the case and removing a chip that is screwed onto the drive. This invalidates the warranty.

I got this info directly from Clickfree after spending time trolling around (as one does) to find out how to remove the CDFS partition, thinking it was only some sort of custom partition that just needed the right software 2 "kill". But no, Clickfree want to do an Apple and make life as hard as possible for those just wanting a vanilla backup drive. One can't even deactivate the chip through some sort of software BIOS tool that Clickfree might have in their tech support toolkit. I realise the CDFS "partition" is small - only 100MB - but it was the principle of the thing, and I like my drives / systems lean and slim with as little intrusive software as possible (I have no intention of using the Clickfree software). Which leads onto the second thing...

2) Due to something about the CDFS "partition" on Clickfree C2 desktop external hard drives, Windows 7 Backup refuses to accept the drive as a valid location for a System Image.

At first I thought the stupid error message I was getting from W7 Backup "The drive is not a valid backup location" might be to do with the fact that my internal drive is 1TB and so is the Clickfree drive. But no, size doesn't matter. :D I've got an older WD 500GB drive in a generic external case, USB 2.0 only. So, I plugged that in, and * PRESTO * W7 Backup was as happy as a pig in mud. Therefore, one can only surmise that something about that stupid CDFS partition / chip thing blocks W7 Backup from being able to use it for a System Image. Note that a normal backup with W7 Backup appears to works fine, just no System Image included.

So, let this be a warning to those who, like me, just want a plain, ordinary external backup hard drive with no hassles that they can configure / use any way they want: stay well away from Clickfree!

I hope this saves someone else all the grief and aggravation it's cause me...

Cheers
Peter

Tags: Clickfree, C2, USB 3.0, CDFS, "The drive is not a valid backup location", Windows 7, Backup, System Image